How admirably clear and concise is this great document! Never were more important words written by uninspired men. They were no rebels against the crown of England; and hence they declare their loyalty to James, their lawful sovereign according to apostolic order. But they formed "a civil body politic," and thus asserted the right to selfgovernment. Who had a right to forbid them? They had suffered every thing but death, sacrificed all the endearments of home, become pilgrims on earth, all to be free; and they would be free, they were free: and as if all unconscious of the nobleness of soul which gave formal utterance to these exalted principles, and regardless of the fearful struggles it would cost to maintain them, they resolved to act as lawmakers and civil rulers, simply and only "for the general good of the colony."

But it should be henceforth impossible to misunderstand them. They were not a company of mercenary adventurers. Their personal convenience and worldly interests were all subordinate to a lofty Christian purpose, which men purely selfish would find it impossible to comprehend. They had undertaken this whole daring enterprise "for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith." This is the highest conception of man on earth, the loftiest moral grandeur within the range of human thought and expression; and, despite all the frailties and errors inevitably human appearing in their future, history nobly vindicates the sincerity and practical effectiveness of this high resolve. The record and the deeds are immortal.

And let it not be forgotten that this was clear, unquestionable advance in the assertion of human rights. In the Pilgrims, the race had stepped forward of its boldest ventures in the direction of civil liberty. There had been republics before; high claims had been set up for the rights of man in the Old World and the New, and death-struggles had been risked to vindicate them: but "this was the birth of popular constitutional liberty."

* Bancroft, i. 310.

Well indeed it was that an attempt so bold, and defiant of precedents and power, an achievement so improbable, should be undertaken "in the name of God; " that a covenant so holy, and bearing in its bosom the fate of uncounted millions, should be made " in the presence of God," and avowedly and sincerely "for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith." In this alone there was hope of success; and we shall see, as we advance, that our Pilgrim Fathers had thus identified and recognized the essential lifeforce of the great American system, the vital active sovereignty of God. Well, therefore, did President Stiles say, in 1783, "It is certain that civil dominion was but the second motive, religion the primary one, with our ancestors, in coming hither, and settling this land. It was not so much their design to establish religion for the benefit of the State, as civil government for the benefit of religion, and as subservient, and even necessary, to the peaceable enjoyment and unmolested exercise of religion, of that religion for which they fled to these ends of the earth."

C

CHAPTER VIII.

UNIV. OF

COLONIZATION AND LIBERTY IN MASSACHUSETTS.

"Soon after the Reformation, a few people came over for conscience' sake. This apparently trivial incident may transfer the great seat of empire into America." JOHN ADAMS.

OUR Christian emigrants land on Cape Cod, just in the rear of our present beautiful Provincetown; but they touch the land only to thank God, and begin the work of exploration for the site of their town. Their home is yet in "The Mayflower." It was chilly November. "It snowed, and did blow all the day and night, and froze withal." They must be in haste to prepare for their shivering families a cover from the storms of winter. Standish and Bradford could not wait sixteen days for repairing the shallop. Regardless of perils from the Indians, they pushed out by land, but found no place for a settlement. The shallop was now out coasting for some fair haven and for the land of promise; but those who landed to search "were tired marching up and down the steep hills and deep valleys, which lay half a foot thick with snow." Thanks to Providence, the Indians had buried a little corn there for this dreadful time of need. Brave men continue the search. The war-whoop and death-arrows salute them as they rise from their morning prayers. “The Mayflower" moves along the coast, and seems about to wreck amid a storm of dreadful fury; but God moves a sailor to cry out to her frightened pilot, "About with her, or we are cast away!" "About" she turns, skims over the surf, and is safe. Noble men are on the land; demands are urgent: but they will by no means break the holy sabbath. On Monday they

are in "The Mayflower," and she moves cautiously. At length, on the "eleventh day of December, old style, the exploring party of the forefathers land" on the rock henceforth to be sacred in history a the place on which New-England freedom first firmly set her foot and began her mighty work.

THE MEN AND THE TIME.

Such men as our Pilgrim sires would not have been the world's choice for the founding of a new empire, at least not with the unpropitious events which crowded around Plymouth Rock. But what wisdom and foresight could have been more evidently infinite? The Pilgrims were a hardy race, a firm, enduring stock. Trained to self-reliance under the direct guidance of Providence, baptized in the sea of suffering, they had the certain combinations of vast and irresistible power. Purer, nobler blood never flowed in Anglo-Saxon veins. Religion was their element, their grand controlling power. They must worship. The triune Jehovah had revealed himself to them, and they were divinely moved to adore him in spirit and in truth, in public and in private; and when, in the land of their birth, they found they could not, they fled as from the plague, ready to go to the ends of the earth for the privilege of hearing the pure gospel preached, and offering up fervent prayers without the presence of a domineering, execrable censorship.

They threw open the Holy Bible, and bade their sons and their daughters look in and see heaven's own light with their own eyes, before they were tempted to believe that only a dismal night of scepticism and woe was reserved for this guilty state.

What could be more evident than the movement of a God among the suffering ones of the Old World, in stirring the spirit of enterprise, pouring dauntless courage into their throbbing bosoms, selecting the choicest among them, imbuing them with the spirit of a new social system, and

guiding them to the chosen land? What but Divinity could have produced such recognitions of his sovereign authority, the acceptance of a mission so mysterious and so difficult, and the high resolves and sustained energy manifest in every step of their wonderful career?

They were here at length to toil, to battle, to pray, and at length to die, but not until they had sent their heroic blood coursing down through the veins of future generations to the end of time. Here they would bravely enact the pledges of their farewell address on the strand of Delfthaven on the morning of their embarkation. "We are actuated," they said, "by the hope of laying some foundation, or making way for the propagation of the kingdom of Christ to the remote ends of the earth, though we shall be but the steppingstones to others." "Laying some foundation." Yes; and what a foundation they laid! The lapse of ages will but suffice to show its amazing solidity and breadth. "The kingdom of Christ." How sublimely their ideas of government and the destiny of man rose above the grovelling conceptions of avarice and ambition! "The propagation of the kingdom of Christ to the remote ends of the earth." Did ever a feeble colony venture upon the heaving bosom of the ocean, to plant themselves upon a foreign shore amid wild and merciless savages, for such an object as this? The truth is, the whole movement was, in all its grand features, superhuman, a clear demonstration of a reigning Divinity in the affairs of men.

The period of this colonization was timely. Had it been "immediately on the discovery of the American continent, the old English institutions would have been planted under the powerful influence of the Roman-Catholic religion; had the settlement been made under Elizabeth, it would have been before activity of the popular mind in religion had conducted to a corresponding activity in politics; "* had it been before the orders for conformity and the bitter persecutions for attempts to exercise the rights of conscience,

* Bancroft, i. 308.